The Power of the Spirit 275noble to him by the power of their vision; when it is the intellect
through which it labours, the great poets are those who give
a profound enlightening idea and creative interpretation of the
world and nature and all that man is and does and thinks and
dreams, but when the spirit turns to its own large intuitive will
and vision, then it is yet profounder things to which the great
poet must give utterance, the inmost sense of things, the inmost
consciousness of Nature, the movement of the deepest soul of
man, the truth that reveals the meaning of existence and the
universal delight and beauty and the power of a greater life and
the infinite potentialities of our experience and self-creation.
These may not be the only strains, but they will be the greatest
and those which the highest human mind will demand from
the poet and they will colour all the rest by their opening of
new vistas to the general intelligence and life sense of the race.
And whatever poetry may make its substance or its subject, this
growth of the power of the spirit must necessarily bring into it a
more intense and revealing speech, a more inward and subtle and
penetrating rhythm, a greater stress of sight, a more vibrant and
responsive sense, the eye that looks at all smallest and greatest
things for the significances that have not yet been discovered
and the secrets that are not on the surface. That will be the type
of the new utterance and the boundless field of poetic discovery
left for the inspiration of the humanity of the future.